granted that if "Tom" were white and free it would be
unquestionably right to punish him--it would be no loss to anybody; but
to shut up a valuable slave for life--that was quite another matter.
As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and
the creditors sold him down the river.

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO "THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS"
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time
of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He
has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has
some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he
trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting
results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought
which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little
tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he
is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as
it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on
till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has
happened to me so many times.
And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the
long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and
find itself superseded by a quite different one. It was so in the case
of a magazine sketch which I once started to write--a funny and fantastic
sketch about a prince and a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of
its own accord, and in that new shape spread itself out into a book. Much
the same thing happened with PUDD'NHEAD WILSON. I had a sufficiently
hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a
tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing
circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was, that it was not one
story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and
interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and
annoyance. I could not offer the book for publication, for I was afraid
it would unseat the reader's reason, I did not know what was the matter
with it, for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one.
It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript back
and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied
over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay. I had
no further trouble. I pulled one of th